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How to Decorate Like a Princess

Many times, when people see my room, they ask me for decorating advice. I usually don't have anything useful to tell them. Knowing how to decorate might just come naturally to modern princesses. We have a strong sense of style and aesthetics, buy whatever looks nice, and find a good spot to put it. Princess fans also rarely throw anything away because there's a high probability we will still love all the same movies we did as children. Many of us have huge collections of merchandise that we have been building for years for years. I've gotten so many compliments on the way I set up my room the years that it's only fair for me to try to give a few tips and tricks for people who are struggling to make their rooms look as perfectly princess as possible.

The first thing I recommend to any modern princess is to find a sheer canopy to hang over her bed. Nothing says "princess" more than waking up to the world through a rose-colored filter every morning. Canopies such as the one I use (pictured above) can instantly transform any ordinary-looking bedroom into a royal suite. I even have a second Disney Princess canopy that I hang over my dresser because I love the look of it so much. You can find plenty of options on Amazon or eBay by doing a quick search for "princess canopy." Many furniture stores carry them as well. I try to find princess versions of as many furniture pieces and electronics as I can, including my lamp, alarm clock, and TV (which I no longer use due to being outdated). Pink or purple versions of items you already need allow your room to feel more regal than the generic neutral-toned versions.

Next, finding a way to display all of your gadgets and gizmos important to making a princess room feel like your own personal haven, just as Ariel does with her grotto. If you follow this blog regularly, chances are that you already have tons of dolls, figurines, and collectibles of your favorite characters. Merely having a lot of possessions is not the same as surrounding yourself with them. As you can see above, I have a four-tier shelf set that I use to display different dolls and collectibles on each level. Some people can't find the space to display their collections, so they put them in away in a box or stuff them all together on a single shelf that gets so crammed that it becomes difficult to appreciate them. I try to spread out my collection as much as possible with a few dolls or figurines on every available surface so that no matter which direction I look toward, I will see something that brings me happiness and serenity.

Once your collectibles are set up, there is still the issue of blank walls. No princess likes being surrounded by blank walls. It makes you feel trapped in a tower, like Rapunzel. I have never personally owned a house, which means I have never had the privilege of being able to paint my own walls, but I've seen many lovely masterpieces online in which people have princess murals or designs themed after movies that match the rest of their room. For those of us who don't have the budget of a princess, there are countless posters, lithographs, sketches, and framed artwork of our favorite characters available to purchase just about anywhere. When people ask me where I got all of the artwork papering my walls, I never have a direct answer because it comes from all over the place. Many of my posters were presented to me as gifts. Some were purchased from artists at conventions and autographed. Others came from magazines, calendars, news inserts, or even doll boxes. It doesn't matter where it came from. If I think it's pretty, it's going up on my wall.

A princess's room is her palace, so why not use every resource you have to make yours feel like one? All it takes is an eye for finding nice things over time and placing them on display in a way that envelopes you inside of your own fantasy world. Throughout my life, my room was the one place I could go to feel at peace even when it felt like the whole world was against me. I'm always on the lookout for more ways to enhance the fantastical reality that I have the privilege of coming home to every night.

Back around 2012, a friend of mine sent me a press release about how Disney was making a new princess show about a little girl from a poor village who becomes a princess overnight when her mother marries the king. The endearing image of the little girl on the press release instantly caught my attention with her unique reddish-brown curls, playful expression, and gorgeous lavender dress that was dripping with pearl accents. Something about this description and image got me so excited for the series that I got to work right away on making a grown-up sized cosplay of Sofia's elegant gown. The series premiered on Disney Junior with a TV special called Once Upon a Princess in which Sofia received her legendary Amulet of Avalor and sang about her insecurities for her future life as a princess heroine in the song "Not Ready To Be a Princess." I loved her instantly. Over the next six years, she took me on a four season-long journey filled with Disney Princesses, fairies, mermaid…

The internet has been buzzing about Kingdom Hearts III finally getting a release date after fifteen long years of anticipation. Unless it gets delayed again, we will be able to catch up with Sora, Donald, and Goofy as they travel through the realms of various Disney movies on January 29th, 2019. There have been a couple of trailers dropped over the last few days revealing footage from Frozen, Tangled, Toy Story, Monsters Inc., Hercules, and Pirates of the Caribbean. For me, the biggest announcement came from the latter half of last night's trailer in which Larxene of Organization XIII remarked that Elsa might be one of the new seven pure hearts that they needed for their latest quest. Anyone who has played the first game knows that this is a reference to the Princesses of Heart, a select group of Disney Princesses who had their chance to become video game royalty when they got captured by Maleficent in an attempt to use their pure hearts to open the Door to Darkness. My biggest pe…

We all had lots of fun playing with princess dolls as kids and brushing their hair until it became ratty and tangled. For those of us who are older, there has is the option of purchasing pricier collectible dolls that are made with finer details in their hair and clothes and come with their own stands for display purposes. While princesses have never exactly been lacking in options for collectible dolls, the Disney Princess Designer Collection that was revealed at the D23 Expo in 2011 was the start of something special. Each princess had her own designer dress that looked like it came straight off a modern-day runway. The collection was released alongside lithographs, cards, mugs, and other paraphernalia featuring beautiful matching artwork. The dolls themselves weren't sculpted from your typical Barbie mold. They had fully articulated wrist and elbow joints, salon quality hair that stayed perfectly in place, bigger painted eyes, and long realistic eyelashes that you could actuall…

In 2008, the Philippines released a mermaid princess telenovela that was based on a popular graphic novel by Mars Ravelo in 1952. Dyesebel is loosely based on the story of "The Little Mermaid" with a few distinct differences. It was Dyesebel's mother, Queen Lucia, who first fell in love with a human and left the underwater world of Sirenea to be with him, sacrificing her memories of her life as a mermaid in the process. Dyesebel was born on land, but because of her tail, her mother returned her to the sea, entrusting her to her best friend, Banak, to raise her. Her human father, Tino, was murdered by humans who believed that mermaids were bad luck. Unaware of the circumstances of her birth, Dyesebel grew up curious about the human world until one day, she fell in love with a human and was doomed to follow in her mother's footsteps. The 2008 adaptation of Dyesebel is performed in the native Filipino language, Tagalog, but I was able to watch it with English subtitles …

If you're one of the five people on Earth who still hasn't seen the new Wreck-It Ralph 2 trailer that dropped this morning, I'm here to break it down for you. The trailer featured roughly the first half of a scene in which all of the living voice actresses for the Disney Princesses reprised their roles as Vanellope snuck into their secret internet headquarters that was presented at the D23 Expo last year. A screenshot released last week previewed the scene with Ariel missing, but now we see that she was just off-screen combing her hair with her favorite dinglehopper in a blinged out version of pink tea dress along with lots more animation of other the princesses in their oddly disproportionate new CGI style animation. Let's take a look.

For starters, it's a bit odd how Ariel and Cinderella have swapped the levels of bling on their ballgowns. In the 1950 animated movie, Cinderella's dress appeared to have made from a lightweight silvery-white fabric emblazoned w…

The internet went a little crazy when Entertainment Weekly released Disney's first promo photos of the fully costumed actors from their upcoming Aladdin remake last week. Many were disappointed with what they saw, which unfortunately tends to be the case for live-action remakes. For instance, Aladdin's signature purple vest was changed to red, making it closer to the Broadway version of the show. He was also given a relatively nice shirt underneath, which is more than a little confusing for those of us who remember how poor he was in the original film. Will Smith as the Genie looked a little too much like a normal human instead of a mystical blue entity, but apparently that's still coming. Princess fans were most excited to see previews of Jasmine's wardrobe. In terms of quantity, the internet did not disappoint. We now have images of three of Jasmine's looks that will be featured in the movie as well as a peek at her new handmaiden.

In my "Little Mermaid" origins post, I mentioned that there were three live-action movies in the works based on the beloved Hans Christian Andersen tale. Since then, a few announcements have been made about all three of these movies. One of them has a theatrical release date, and it's sooner than you might think. The circus-themed indie movie that's had a trailer out for several years now is coming to select AMC theaters on August 17th. That's in two months! I wish I could be more excited about it, but the plot looks a lot closer to the 2006 tongue-in-cheek teen mermaid movie Aquamarine than the fairy tale that it's named after. The trailer focuses on how a little girl's belief in mermaids has the potential to save the aquatic heroine who is held captive in a tank at a carnival. I've been feeling indifferent about this adaptation ever since the first trailer was released, but it's nice to know that I will have the option to see it on the big scree…

Sofia the First, everyone's favorite princess-in-training, has met every official Disney Princess that existed when her show began with the sole exception of Pocahontas. The power of her purple amulet granted her the ability to summon famous princesses whenever she was in trouble. Technically, she never met Anna either, but the episode "Olaf and the Tale of Miss Nettle" implied that she was supposed to meet her but got Olaf instead because her amulet was on the fritz. About a year ago, her amulet turned pink and granted her new powers. It now sends her to help princesses, meaning that the chances of her meeting Pocahontas at this point are virtually nonexistent. Why did they acknowledge every other princess movie except this one? Actually, they did acknowledge the 1995 animated classic in an episode of Sofia, but it was very subtle.

In the 2015 episode of Sofia the First, "The Secret Library," Sofia discovers a hidden passageway beneath her castle where a boat …